Since the global financial crisis everyone has been singing from the same songsheet: we must get back to making things. Decades of trusting to financial wizardry and celebrity culture, and the concomitant abuse of anything that involves so-called “metal bashing”  must end. Global warming, declining oil reserves and financial meltdown might be scary problems but they also present an opportunity. The jobs lost through financial collapse will be replaced by jobs in the new green energy and infrastructure industries, thus solving three problems at once. So far, there hasn’t been much sense of what it might take to achieve this. 

But now the BBC, hitherto a major player in the world of celerity culture is running as series on BBC2 celebrating cutting edge engineering in Britain. The second programme, How to Build a Jumbo Jet Engine, BBC2, 4 July, still available on iPlayer, is essential viewing.  

Roll Royce built the Merlin engines that powered the WW2 Spitfire. They are now one of only three major aero engine manufacturers in the world. What emerges from the programme is how brilliantly Rolls Royce has combined hi-tech materials science with traditional craft engineering. 

The amazing material science includes fan blades made from three bonded layers of titanium that are then expanded at high temperature for hours (a week?) to create a light and strong internal matrix. 

The 96 turbine blades are made from single crystal of titanium alloy which have to operate at 300 degrees over the melting point. It is cooled by air forced through an array of cooling holes. 

The big mystery of Rolls Royce is: how has this company remained at the cutting edge whilst almost the entire British manufacturing industry has collapsed around it? The programme is absolutely inspirational.

 

 
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